Tuesday, September 16, 2014

NY law still favors parents over unmarried lesbian lovers

The LGBTQIA assault on the American family continues, with a long NY Times article about some trashy irresponsible lesbians who want to change centuries of law to suit their twisted child custody demands.

The Marriage Equality Act, which New York State passed in June 2011, allowed Jann Paczkowski to marry her partner, Jamie, with the assurance that “the marriages of same-sex and different-sex couples” would “be treated equally in all respects under the law.” But when the couple separated and Ms. Paczkowski sought joint custody of the 2-year-old boy they were raising together, she discovered the limits of that assurance. On June 30, 2014, a judge in Nassau County family court ruled that Ms. Paczkowski did not have legal standing to seek access to the boy — because even under the Marriage Equality Act, she was not his parent.

In his decision, Judge Edmund M. Dane acknowledged “inequity” and “imbalance” in the law, adding that if Ms. Paczkowski were a man in the same position, the law might point toward a different ruling. But in the end, he left Jann with no contact with the boy.

The decision devastated Ms. Paczkowski, 36. “You can see how angry and upset I am,” she said on a recent afternoon, seated beside her court-appointed lawyer after a morning spent moving cars for an auction house. She had not seen the boy since a brief visit on Mother’s Day.

No, there is no “inequity” or “imbalance”. If she were a man and the biological father, she could request a DNA test in order to prove paternity. As it stands, she has no biological relationship with the boy, and she had not a legal relationship with the mom at the time of birth.

New York law provides a way for kooky lesbians like them to jointly have a child, if that is what they want. They could have gotten a same-sex marriage license before birth, or gotten a legal adoption. The issues don't even have much to do with lesbianism. As far as I know, a step-father is not considered a legal father unless some legal process to effect that is undertaken.

Beyond her pain, the ruling also illuminated a snarl in New York’s treatment of same-sex couples, three years after the passage of the Marriage Equality Act, according to some legal scholars.

“This is a troubling ruling because it leaves a same-sex parent as a legal stranger to her child,” said Suzanne B. Goldberg, director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia University law school. Family law, she said, “has not caught up with the way families live their lives, or the rest of New York law. And that gap is causing tremendous damage.”

No, there is no snarl. The boy is with his mom, the only known legal parent. Or he would be, if the mom (Jamie) did not turn out to be unfit:

She had taken up with a volatile boyfriend, who was subsequently given a court order to stay away from Jamie and J. In February, as lawyers were preparing papers, a judge deemed Jamie neglectful for, among other things, failing to protect J. from her new boyfriend. ...

In July, J. appeared at day care with “red marks and bruising on both sides of his face” that were “consistent with hits by a hand on both sides of the child’s face,” according to court documents. Jamie told child protective workers that neither she nor her boyfriend had hit the boy, but the hospital found that his injuries were “not consistent with” her explanation, according to records.

The court removed J. from Jamie’s home and placed him in foster care. ...

Jamie is also pregnant.

Remind me, who thought that it was a good idea for lesbians to have babies?

Yes, I know that sometimes married, opposite-sex, church-going couples turn out to be lousy parents. But the vast majority are good parents. But in the case of lesbians, the gay lobby's best examples for changing the law are all people who should never have been parents in the first place.

Look at this rant against court decisions that follow laws saying that the parents are the parents:

New York’s highest court addressed the question of a non-biological mother’s rights in 1991, ruling that a woman named Alison D. did not have standing to seek visitation rights to the child born to her former partner, Virginia M., even though she had been involved with the child since before birth. The court held that to allow Alison D. access to the child would infringe upon Virginia M.’s right to decide with whom her child associated. Simply acting as a mother to the boy did not make Alison D. a parent, the court ruled.

Even if it would be “beneficial to a child to have continued contact with a nonparent,” the judges said, they could not compel the other parent to grant that contact.

The decision was hotly contested at the time. In her dissent, Judge Judith Kaye — who later became the top judge in the state — wrote that in defining parenthood solely by biology, the decision unfairly hurt children by severing ties that might be crucial to their development. She warned that the ruling “may affect a wide spectrum of relationships — including those of longtime heterosexual stepparents, ‘common law’ and non-heterosexual partners such as involved here, and even partners in scientific reproduction procedures.”

Judge Kaye proved prescient. The Alison D. ruling affected “countless cases across the state,” wrote another appeals court judge, Victoria Graffeo, in a 2010 decision. Though other states passed laws to recognize de facto parents, New York’s did not, allowing non-biological parents only one route to legal status, by adopting their partners’ children.

At the same time, though, in cases involving heterosexual couples, various courts treated husbands as de facto fathers, even if they were not biologically related to the children. Judges weighed the best interests of the child in granting the men custody or visitation, or in ordering them to pay child support.

I say that parents should have parental rights. Non-parents should not. People should have the freedom to define their lives and responsibilities. Judges should have little or no discretion over who is a legal parent. Adoption, for example, should be a voluntary act by parties involved, and not an imposition by a judge based on the BIOTCh and the 2-year-old calling "Daddy" to the bisexual mom's current lesbian lover.

The lesbian fake daddy's plan is to use the same-sex marriage license to try to get custody of the second kid, and then trade it for the first kid. Or persuade an appellate court to change NY law.

The above NY Times story is a news story, not an opinion piece. All of the arguments are anti-family, and no reasons are given for the existing law that has apparently had wide public approval for centuries.